Technologies

What Our Customers Are Saying

Several IT Directors at schools in the area had referred Washington Montessori School to Reverse Polarity to help us with IT issues we were dealing with. That was 3 years ago and we are happily working in a much improved IT environment, with many problems solved that the school did not have the experience "in-house" to handle.

Reverse Polarity is sensitive to school budgets, schedules, and the experience levels of staff within school IT departments. They have worked hard to assist us in prioritizing IT projects. In addition, they helped provide "on-site" experienced IT staff when out-sourcing became a necessity for our school's technology needs.

Reverse Polarity has also been known to help place talented, technology staff in schools. They are uniquely set up to match a school with an IT person that is familiar with school environments and has the special qualities that are needed to assist students, staff, and a school's infrastructure. They also continue to offer unique pricing structures to enable even small budgets to utilize their services.

Reverse Polarity's primary focus is on schools and their IT needs and they have a broader depth of experience than most school's IT departments could ever hope to have.

I enthusiastically endorse Reverse Polarity as the "Go-To" firm when your IT department is on "overload." I would also recommend Reverse Polarity to review your planned IT projects and budgets to help these important expenditures stay on the correct course and be implemented in the best manner.

monitoring

A recent feature request on the Bacula Community version mailing list was to have Bacula set a job's status to "W" (Backup OK -- with warnings) when a job completed with zero files or zero bytes.

The general consensus was that this probably should be handled outside of Bacula code, since it would require an additional directive and of course additional coding.

This request interested me and it prompted me to write this short script.

After editing some basic variables near the top of the script, the script requires only one command line parameter - the jobid - and currently also accepts "debug" to log everything to stdout, and "zero_incremental_ok" which does not trigger when Incremental or Differential jobs have zero files or zero bytes.

In April of 2013, a request was made on the Bacula mailing list for a way to get daily and weekly backup reports. This got me to thinking that such a daily email would be useful.

So, off I went to write a simple bash shell script to generate these reports. Over time, many features were added to this script and it has evolved quite a bit over the past 4 years. The original posting about this script may be found here: http://www.revpol.com/baculasummaryemails-ORIG

Here is a very simple script to make sure that your Bacula bootstrap files are emailed to an offsite system. This script may be called manually, or from a cron job, or from a Bacula Catalog backup job's "After" Runscript.

I thought it would be a good idea to monitor some basic stats from the Samba servers that we manage and maintain. It would be nice, for example, to know the total number of users in the domain (LDAP, or tbd), the total number of machines in the domain, the number of currently connected users, the number of currently opened shares, and total number of open files.

Of course, if we have all of this information, we are going to graph it too!

Below is a short Xymon external script (bash shell script) which gathers this information using pdbedit, smbldap-userlist, and smbstatus and reports the information back to the Xymon server.